Sermons and thoughts on faith on Scripture from my time at Old Presbyterian Meeting House and Falls Church Presbyterian Church, plus sermons and postings from "Pastor James," my blog while pastor at Boulevard Presbyterian in Columbus, OH.
I once heard someone from the Alban Institute say that one of the problems mainline congregations have is, "People come to us looking for an experience of God, and we give them information about God." On a day when the reading from Acts is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, I wonder if the way we approach the Bible doesn't sometimes contribute to this problem.
When our primary concerns revolve around what the Bible says, whether it is historically true and so on, we are focusing on what information is contained in the Bible. The problem with this is it seems to reduce the faith to knowing the right information. But as the reading from Acts shows, even disciples who were taught personally by Jesus, who witnessed his ministry first hand and experienced his resurrection, were not able to be the Church until the Spirit lived in them. The Apostle Paul spoke of something similar, of being in Christ and so something completely new.
How might we approach the Bible so that it could be an encounter with God rather than information about God? Approaching Scripture as a conversation partner rather than a reference source may be a good start. But we need to go further and realize that Scripture can speak to us beyond the words on the page, to expect that Scripture has more than information to impart.
Interest in "spirituality" has grown tremendously in recent years. I believe that, in part, this arises out of the failure of informational approaches to the Bible. Practices such as lectio divina, divine or spiritual reading, provide means of encountering the text rather than asking what information is there. Scripture becomes a conversation or prayer partner in which God is experienced, in which new insights and guidance are found quite apart from what a casual reader of the text might see. This is a rather different kind of knowing from the typical, Western, rational sort of knowing. (A web search on dectio divina will provide you with numerous articles on it and suggestions for how to practice it.)
I could read every book ever written about a historical figure, be it George Washington, Alexander the Great, Amelia Earhart, or Jesus, but I will never actually know any of these people on the basis of this information. Knowing about someone and knowing someone are very different things. And I believe the Bible, set free from being a reference or history book, has the power to help us know God.
In his fascinating book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren says that Christians of all stripes tend to use the Bible as a legal constitution. Considering that we Americans are the product of a constitutional system of government and law, this is hardly surprising. And so we use the Bible like a legal reference tool, searching for sections that pertain to the subject at hand. Worse, we often use it as a reference, searching for those sections that support what we already believe, have planned, etc. And so at various times and places, the Bible is pro-slavery and anti-slavery; it's for women as pastors and against it, and so on.
But was the Bible ever intended as such a document. In the previous two days, I've mentioned historical contradictions in the Bible, and one of the variant story's of Judas' demise is a reading for today. And today's Old Testament reading features the judge, Deborah. She's leading the people of God and giving orders to the military commander, despite the fact that other biblical passages would seem to frown on such a role.
An obvious problem with the Bible as constitution is the fact that such documents were unknown to the biblical writers. They had laws, of course, but not foundational documents that undergirded those laws. Their foundations lived in narratives, in stories. Stories and myths were their primary vehicles for talking about who they were and who God was. (I use the word myth not in the popular sense of untruth, but in the classic sense of stories that explain the beginnings of creation, peoples, etc.) Because such stories were used to explain and define, historical accuracy was never their primary purpose. And so you can find - especially in the Old Testament - stories that contradict one another lying side by side. For example, read the stories connected to Noah. If you pay attention you will notice differing accounts that report contradictory numbers of animals on the ark. There are also two Creation stories with differing orders of creation
Stories, by nature, make poor legal reference material. We understand this when Jesus tells us a parable, but for some reason we expect the Bible as a whole to abide by our modern notions of truth and accuracy. But if we can set those aside for a moment, how might we come to the Bible in a more productive manner? Perhaps the notion of Holy Conversations may be of some help here.
If I see the Bible, with its variety of stories, poems, hymns, laws, proverbs and so on, as a divinely inspired collection that grows out of various faithful people's encounter with God, perhaps I can enter into a conversation with these various folks from various times and places. (Brian McLaren suggests thinking of the Bible as a "community library," with many thoughts and views on faith, not all of them in lock step agreement with one another.)
Interestingly, John Calvin, the father of my own Reformed/Presbyterian Tradition, modeled what I'm talking about when he took up the issue of lending money at interest. We modern folks have forgotten that this was once a burning religious issue. Christians were barred from being bankers because of the biblical prohibitions on lending at interest up until Calvin's day (the 1500s). But when Calvin looked around the city of Geneva, where he served as both spiritual leader and city manager, he saw how fledgling small business enterprises needed capital to start small factories. But those pesky biblical prohibitions made it difficult to raise such capital. A constitutional reading of the Bible was of little help to Calvin. Finding verses that supported lending at interest was nearly impossible.
But Calvin didn't use such an approach. Rather, he engaged the Bible in a conversation. He tried to understand how those biblical prohibitions functioned within the story of Israel and then the Church. And in this conversation, he came to the conclusion that these prohibitions were not a matter of God being against lending or interest per se, they were protections for the vulnerable and poor. But Calvin wanted to use lending to fund business that would employ the poor and raise their status. And so he concluded that lending (with certain restraints to prevent hurting people) was in keeping with the original prohibitions. He readily admitted that the Bible did not permit lending money at interest, but he claimed that in allowing just that in Geneva, he was upholding the fundamental concerns of God for the week and oppressed, the poor and the widow.
When you read the Bible, what sort of book or resource is it for you? Do you see the larger narrative and library, the different parts in conversation with one another? Or do you read verses in isolation like a legal code? I have to admit that preaching can encourage the latter. Each week there is a short snippet of Scripture from which I am to draw biblical truth. I won't claim that it's making my preaching any better, but more and more I am seeing the entire Bible as a part of every sermon, with the verses for that Sunday raising their voice to speak within the great cloud of witnesses, each of whom have some insight to share with us.
Today's readings from Matthew and Acts give me another jumping off point for talking about Scripture as conversation. As Acts (written by the same person who pens Luke) opens, the disciples meet Jesus a number times over the 40 day period following Easter. This all happens in Jerusalem, where the disciples have been since Jesus' arrest and where Jesus orders them to stay until the receive the Holy Spirit. Today's Matthew reading tells of Jesus' death on the cross. In Matthew, this will be the last time any of the 12 disciples will see Jesus in Jerusalem. After his resurrection, Jesus appears to the women and has them direct the disciples to a mountain in Galilee where he appears to them.
There is simply no reconciling these different accounts if we are going to read the Bible as a history book. (Matthew and Acts also offer wildly different accounts of Judas' death. In Matthew a repentant Judas tries to return his betrayal payment and then hangs himself. In Acts the wicked Judas buys property with his ill-gotten gain and promptly "burst open in the middle and his bowels gushed out.) But if the Bible is not primarily a history book, what are we to do with it?
There are a number of options. Some people look at the obvious historical contradictions and conclude that the Bible is simply unreliable. And here is where literalists' insistence on the historical and scientific accuracy of Bible often undercuts sharing the faith. Insisting that two radically different versions of an event are both historically true makes the faith unintelligible to many people. And the mental calisthenics sometimes used to explain away historical contradictions only make the problem worse.
A far better option, to my mind, is to admit that the Bible is neither a history nor a science text. Today's accounts in Matthew and Acts are rooted in historical events well known to the first readers of both. The authors are not trying to tell those First Century readers what happened. Rather they are trying to explain the significance of Jesus' resurrection. Acts is tracing how the resurrection has launched a missionary movement centered in Jerusalem and spreading out to all the known world. Matthew has a more Jewish perspective, and he launches this movement from a mountain in Galilee, mirroring how Israel is constituted at another mountain in the Sinai wilderness. Both accounts offered rich possibilities for the first Christians to contemplate and understand what was taking place as a result of Jesus' resurrection. And they still offer fertile opportunities for Christians to enter into conversation around what it means for Jesus to be the new Law-giver on the mountain, and for the Church to be a mission oriented body empowered and pushed ever outward by the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps that's enough for one day, but I think I'll continue this thread tomorrow.
Christians seem to fight a lot over the Bible. "The Bible says this. The Bible says that," we insist, usually to others who don't see it the same way. What people fight over says something about what they think is important. So I suppose that all this fighting at least says we consider the Bible important, that we expect it to guide us in some way. A more cynical view might say that we simply view the Bible as a convenient trump card, and we want to find ways to use it to our advantage.
In our biblical fighting, there are many who see the Bible as literally true, and thus any verse must be taken at face value as God's direct word. The problems with this stance become obvious to anyone who reads the Bible with much care. The Bible doesn't always agree with itself.
I know that biblical literalists are trying to "protect" the sanctity of God's word by their stance, but I fear that they actually do more harm than good. I fear their stance makes Christianity seem foolish and absurd to those who didn't grow up within such a tradition. They see the insistence that all the various things in the Bible are literally true to mean that faith requires turning off one's brain.
Today's gospel is a good case in point. Many people, even outside the church, have heard that while Jesus was on the cross, he engaged in conversation with the two criminals next to him, and promised the repentant one they would be together in Paradise. Yet in Matthew's gospel, we hear that Jesus was mocked and derided by all manner of folks, and all we hear about the criminals next to him is this, "The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way." That's it.
Then there's today's reading from Judges where God is angry because Israel breaks covenant, and lets them fall to their enemies, but then feels sorry for them when their enemies are bad to them. Are we really supposed to believe that God is so capricious, that God can't anticipate that Israel will suffer once they are defeated?
It seems to me that we need a better way of accessing the Bible than simply saying "I believe it," or "I don't." A number of people have suggested the idea of a conversation. And I like the idea of the Bible as an inspired conversation among people of faith about what it means to live as God's people. It helps me understand how the Bible can say in one place that Israel's men must "send away" their foreign wives and children (Ezra 9-10) and in another place lifts up a foreign wife as a paragon of faithfulness (Ruth).
What does it mean to you to say the Bible is true? More on this tomorrow.
Today's reading from Matthew shows Pilate giving in to the crowd and ordering Jesus' execution. This story has been misused over the years to support anti-Semitism, but of course those who supported Jesus and those who cried for his death, the disciples, and Jesus himself were all Jews. Matthew is a Jew who probably never envisioned a day when Christianity would be a religion distinct from Judaism.
Anti-Semitism aside, I am fascinated by this picture of people who are eagerly awaiting a Messiah yet demand the death of Jesus whose followers hail him as Messiah. No doubt Jesus' opponents operated from a variety of motives, but clearly many of them thought they were being faithful to God in opposing Jesus. He looked nothing like what they expected from God's Messiah. Jesus' own disciples struggled at times to reconcile him with their expectations. So why is it that so many missed God at work in Jesus?
For those who accept that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, we must wrestle with the obvious fact that Jesus defied the religious expectations of his day. None of the religious traditions in Judaism were looking for a Messiah quite like Jesus. Their expectations were drawn from Scripture in much the same way many current Christians' expectations about God and faith are drawn from Scripture. And still the majority rejected Jesus. I have to think this is more than a one time problem. A God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and ways are not our ways (see Isaiah 55:8-9) is bound to act in ways that startle and surprise us on a fairly regular basis. I certainly have my own expectations about God, and they usually cohere with my moderate/progressive sort of Christianity. Others have expectations that cohere with their conservative sort, and so on. And it can be very difficult to discern whether our expectations emerged from our religious experiences or if they simply conform to existing preferences we already had.
I don't believe it responsible simply to say that everyone's truth is true for them. God is God, and not whatever we wish God to be. Sometimes my expectations are simply wrong. Sometimes yours are. So from time to time, whatever our leanings, we need to step back and look afresh at God, and especially at Jesus. From time to time we need to drop all our assumptions about what faith means, what salvation means, what Church is, and so on, and try to get back to Jesus. When you peel off all the layers or interpretation and set aside the mosaic picture of Jesus we've constructed from selected gospel stories and popular imagination, there is much Jesus says and does that still startles and surprises, that still challenges and confounds. All of which draws us a little closer to the true, living God rather than the God of our expectations.
When we were down in South Carolina a couple of weeks ago for my mother-in-law’s birthday, I hit the scan button on the radio to find a local station. The pickings were a bit slim, so when I heard a Beatles song, I stopped it there.
Sometime later, they played a song I haven’t heard in years. It was Janis Joplin singing a cappella, “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porches, I must make amends. Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” A second verse asks for a color TV, but I think I like the third verse best. “Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town? I'm counting on you, Lord, please don't let me down. Prove that you love me and buy the next round, Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town?”
We laugh at the lyrics because the requests are so patently absurd, and yet they are not so unlike some of my own prayers. Who among us hasn’t, at some point, prayed to win the lottery, or, if like me you’ve never actually gotten around to buying a lottery ticket, prayed to come into a big chunk of change by some other means?
What sort of things do you pray for? Do you expect God to meet your requests? What does it mean if God doesn’t do as you ask?
When I was growing up, I somehow got the notion that getting what you prayed for was a good measure of your faith. If you believed in Jesus, really believed and didn’t doubt, it would happen. Which of course meant that failed prayers could be traced back to your doubt or lack of faith.
My childhood notions of faith and prayer had a nice parallel in Santa Claus. You asked Santa to bring you stuff, and getting that stuff was contingent on you believing in Santa Claus. A failure to do so could jeopardize you Christmas morning haul. There was also that business about being good. Santa is apparently a pretty lenient judge, but being bad could also interfere with getting your Christmas list filled.
Now at first glance Santa Claus looks to be a pretty powerful and influential dude. He has all kinds of magical powers and abilities, and he can influence the behavior of millions of children. But it occurs to me that Santa isn’t actually in charge of very much. There’s a formula or contract that he’s a part of, and if children work the system right, he has to run himself ragged doing what they want. In this whole Santa Claus business, Santa isn’t really the one in charge. It’d the kids.
I think that our notions about prayer sometimes reveal a similar sort of Christian faith, one where we are in charge and God is under contract to us. As long as we meet the terms of the contract, God has no choice but to give us the goodies.
And that brings me back to what we pray for and how we expect God to respond. Our prayers say a great deal about our image of God and of ourselves. They give some pretty good clue as to what lies at the very core of our faith.
When you ask Christians about the core of their faith, most folks will give answers that in some way place God or Jesus at the center. But when you ask questions about prayer, it gets a lot more varied. And our answers to questions on prayer sometimes describe a faith where we are at the center, and God, like Santa Claus, is supposed to do our bidding.
Now it is true that Jesus says faith no bigger than a mustard seed would allow us to move mountains. Faith can accomplish tremendous things. But I don’t think Jesus means that having enough faith turns God into a cosmic Santa. And today’s reading helps Jesus’ followers understand what sort of tremendous things to pray for.
When we are at the center of faith everything is measured by how it impacts us. Am I happy? Do I have enough? Am I going to heaven? Is my life fulfilled and meaningful? The questions tend to be different in different times and cultures because they are our questions and our notions of happiness and fulfillment shape them.
But when his followers ask Jesus for prayer lessons, the model prayer he gives them doesn’t function this way. It starts by praising God. Then it asks that things on earth be set right. That’s what “Your kingdom come” means. It is asking that things on earth conform to God’s will. And when this prayer finally gets to the wish list part, the requests are very modest, enough for the day, God’s forgiveness contingent on our forgiveness to those who have hurt us, and protection from temptation or judgment. There are no sports cars, no color TVs, no “the good life.” Rather it is a prayer for a simple life where God provides all we need and our world is reshaped to become the sort of place God intends it to be.
Jesus gone on to encourage us to be persistent in prayer, saying that if we know how to give good things to our children how much more God can be counted on to give good things to us. But if God is the parent and we are the children, that would seem to presume that God gets to decide what is best for us.
I have known the occasional parents who seem to think that their children get to decide what is best for them and the parents’ job is simply to provide whatever it takes to keep them happy. Such parents are usually perpetually frustrated by the impossibility of this task. Their children tend to make everyone around them miserable. And the children themselves are usually frustrated and unhappy to boot.
It turns out that children rarely know what will actually make them happy. They rarely can perceive what is actually best for them. We adults are often only marginally better, and we engage in all sorts of self destructive activity that we hope will make us happy. And yet I still make judgments about God based on how well God responds to what I think is best for me, on whether or not God responds to me in the way I would like.
I saw an article the other day that suggested that when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray they weren’t looking for a better prayer technique or pose. What motivated the disciples’ request was seeing the intimacy Jesus had with God. They were asking, in essence, “Lord, teach us how to love and trust the Father the way you do, that our prayer lives would increase in fullness and honesty.”[1]
You know, we church people are often a funny sort. We are drawn to God. We feel a genuine pull to connect with God. Yet we often seem frightened of getting too close. We want to enlist God in our lives and our causes, but we resist turning our lives over to God. We resist the very thing the disciples saw in Jesus and wanted for themselves. Often churches have abetted this problem, failing to demonstrate a faith that would prompt anyone to notice our intimacy with God and say, “Teach us to love and trust God the way you do.”
I love the Church. But from time to time, the Church might do well stop worrying about doctrines, rules, worship styles, and politics, and get back to Jesus, to gaze lovingly and longingly on the person of Jesus. What if we set aside all notions of what faith and Church are about? What if we let go of all our images and expectations of God and simply gazed on the face of God in this 1st Century, Palestinian Jew? What if we dwelled there long enough that like those first disciples, we started to long for the same sort of trust and intimacy with God? Might we be able to say with them, “Oh Lord, teach us to love and trust the Father as you do, that our prayer lives would increase in fullness and honesty, that your presence and love would become so palpable here that others would long to become more like us.”
Make it so, God; make it so.
[1] Peter W. Marty, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” The Christian Century, July 13, 2010, Vol. 127, No. 14, p. 21
Today's gospel reading contains the famous story of Peter denying Jesus. I've always marveled that the early church preserved this story about the abject failure of one of its key leaders. But there it is, prominently displayed in all four gospels. When Jesus had earlier told Peter this would happen, Peter was full of bravado, insisting he would never do so and, in some accounts, promising to die with Jesus. But when the moment comes, he curses and swears that he does not know Jesus, has never met him.
Much can be drawn from this story. Bold words don't necessarily lead to bold behavior. But on the flip side, colossal failures and even betrayals don't disqualify us from serving Jesus. It would seem that Jesus did not hold Peter's failure against him at all.
But I found myself pondering how it was Peter went so quickly from bravado to betrayal. Was it simply that he was all talk? I don't think so. Too many other episodes show a Peter who could act in bold ways. I wonder if Peter wasn't feeling terribly alone that night. He had been Jesus' constant companion for a very long time, but Jesus had been taken from him. All alone, Peter's fears overwhelmed him. He was all "fight or flight," and fight wasn't an option.
Being alone, really alone, can be terribly frightening. And we people of faith sometimes try to be faithful and religious all on our own. I'm not referring to individualism, though I suppose that is a problem as well. I'm talking about living our lives without much sense of Jesus' presence.
In one of his books, N. Graham Standish speaks of church meetings where we, in essence, pray at the beginning, then ask God to go get a cup of coffee while we do our work. Then when we're done, we ask God to come back in and bless our actions. As an individual, I often wrestle with issues facing my congregation, or struggle with what I am called to do, all by myself, with little sense of Jesus with me. But without Jesus there with us, our fears can bubble up, can frighten us and even overwhelm us. We become more reactionary and primal in our behaviors, and we often regret our actions or decisions later.
Give us some sure sense of your presence, God. Put your Spirit in us that we may never be alone.
Question of the Day: What am I seeking through my religion?
If religion is not primarily a belonging system, but is truly a transformational system, one would need, it seems to me, a very different kind of authority. One needs the experience and conviction of someone who has walked the journey himself or herself. One needs the authority of a person who can say, “I know what God does with pain, because of what God has done with mine.” And not just the authority to say, “You must believe in this and you must believe in that.” This utterly changes the focus of spiritual authority.
For me, almost the best litmus test of whether a person has healthy or unhealthy religion is, “What do they do with their pain?” Because pain is always part of the deal, as Jesus, the Jewish prophets, and Buddha agree.
Most of the Christians I know speak of the Bible having authority. But what they mean by that comes in many shapes and sizes. Literalism with regards to the Bible seems to be more popular today than it was 50 years ago. For example, the number of Christians who say the believe in evolution has shrunk significantly while those who believe the Genesis creation account is historically and scientifically accurate have increased. (The fact that there are two different creation stories with different orders of creation seems to have escaped these folks, but that's a different blog entry.)
What got me thinking about this was today's morning psalm. It rattles off the attributes of those whom God welcomes to the Temple, those whose lives are pleasing to God. The list includes those, "who do not slander with their tongue... who do not lend money at interest." This got me wondering about biblical authority because slandering with the tongue and lending money at interest seem to be pretty popular in our culture.
I certainly don't claim any sort of personal purity here. I've done my share of slandering with the tongue and I've bought investments that amount to lending money at interest. So how is it that I can claim the Bible as an authority?
I think this is a question that more Christians need to take seriously. Saying "God said it. I believe it, and that settles it" is all well and good. But what about God saying not to lend money at interest?
The worst answer to the question of biblical authority seems to be, unfortunately, the most popular answer: to read only the parts I agree with. I'll quote those verses that support my views and conveniently ignore those that don't. Big problem with this method is I become the ultimate authority, not the Bible.
So how does the Bible have its own authority rather than simply conforming to mine? To go back to tongue slandering and lending at interest, when I slander with my tongue (or computer blog), it's wrong and something I need to apologize for. But when it comes to lending at interest, it depends. How can that be?
I'm reasonably convinced (by the Bible) that God is not capricious, that God does things for good reasons. And when I look at those places where God prohibits lending at interest, they all seem to be about not oppressing the poor. In the ancient world, one where there was rarely a need for private citizens to raise lots of capital, lending at interest was often used to trap the poor in inescapable debt. (The "company store" of the early 20th century often functioned this way.) But in the modern world, money lent at interest is often used to allow someone to start a company which then hires people who would otherwise be unemployed and poor. In that case, lending money at interest helps the poor. So I think that biblical authority on this issue says, "It depends." Some sorts of lending at interest - the sort designed to trap people in debt - are sinful, but other sorts may not be.
The big question is, "Am I truly recognizing the Bible's authority?" I think I am. What do you think?
Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.
These words from Psalm 146 are echoed in many other places in the Bible. Those who put their hope and trust in human agents and institutions will ultimately be disappointed, but those who trust and hope in God will be vindicated.
But I have observed that most of us are quite selective in how and where we trust God. And there are some interesting fault lines dividing "liberal" and "conservative" Christians. Conservatives will argue against large scale government social programs and health insurance but support massive military budgets. And liberals will often argue for reductions in military budgets and actions, but support expansion of government spending for social programs and regulation. It seems that both sides at times puts its "trust in princes." We just disagree about where and when.
One of the very real problems for Christians of all stripes is our tendency to domesticate the faith to suit our purposes. We all selectively read our Bibles and we all create God in our image. And liberals and conservatives alike simply ignore Jesus when he tells us that wealth is one of the biggest hindrances to us being a part of God's Kingdom.
I wonder what the faith might look like, what our congregations might look like, if we spent less time trying to convince ourselves that we were truer to the faith than those other folks, and spent more time getting serious about what Jesus calls us to do, both the parts we like and the parts we don't.
